Mouse Trap (1981 Arcade Review)
January 1, 2024 2 Comments
Mouse Trap
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Exidy
First Released December, 1981
NO MODERN RELEASE
Yesterday, I looked at Lady Bug, which can lazily and inaccurately be boiled down to “Pac-Man, only with turnstiles.” Today, I’m kicking off 2024 with “Pac-Man, only with color-coded turnstiles.” Which is lazy and inaccurate. Among other reasons, they’re really more like gates instead of turnstiles. Mouse Trap has four buttons to control the action, which would be startling for any game in 1981, but it’s especially bonkers for a maze chase. Three of the buttons control the different colored gates. So, for example, if you press the red button, all the red gates shift position. It works well and requires players to memorize the entire layout of the maze and plan ahead. Each gate only has two different configurations. Unlike Lady Bug, the placement and layout of the gates allows you to either create fully-fortified barriers between you and the enemies or outright trap them. This is especially true in the center of the screen. It opens-up flexibility to create your own strategy for how you want to play Mouse Trap. Do you want to use the gates offensively to bunch-up the cats and score points when you turn into the dog, or do you want to use them defensively and keep a distance between you and the cats while you collect the dots and/or bonus items? I’m all about games from this era opening up strategy options to players, and Mouse Trap is all about it too.
The turn-the-tables element in Mouse Trap is one of the most unique of this era for multiple reasons. The dog bones you collect aren’t instantly used but rather banked. You can carry up to six of them. The fourth action button uses the bones to transform you into a dog, which allows you to eat the cats. Like Pac-Man, there’s a bonus for eating a string of them before you change back. Besides the fact that you can store the power pellets and use them at an opportune time, there’s three BIG differences between these and Pac-Man’s. (1) Whatever bones you don’t use carry-over between stages and lives. (2) The window for you to eat the enemies is much smaller right from the start. (3) Eating the cats comes at a horrible cost. When the cats respawn, they’re faster and seemingly more aggressive than they were before. They also outnumber you 6 to 1 and have four respawn locations. While bones are plentiful, after a certain point, they’re best used for defensive-only purposes. It’s not just the fact that the cats get quite fast by the third board, but especially because eaten cats return to the playfield very pissed off at you. HEY, IT WASN’T ME! IT WAS THE DOG! By the way, if you’re the dog when you collect the last dot, you’ll get all the remaining time as the dog when you start the next stage. Okay, that’s awesome. Come on, man. This game is WONDERFUL! It’s just so original and layered, and yet nobody talks about it. Sad.
The other danger element of Mouse Trap are the hawks. They bypass the walls of the maze and make a beeline straight for you. No sweat, you say? Because you’ve stored plenty of dog bones, you say? HAH! Yea, sorry, but the hawks are immune to the dog as well. When you hear the CAW CAW CAW noise (and Mouse Trap has EXCELLENT sound design) you have to run like the dickens to the center of the maze and enter the IN door, which teleports you completely randomly to one of the four corners of the screen. Doing this makes the hawk “stupid” (yes, it actually says this on the instruction screen) and it’ll fly off the screen. At first, I didn’t like this aspect of Mouse Trap. It’s not just the random teleportation, which I’m just not a fan of random chance in this kind of game. But, it’s mostly because I felt the hawk was too overpowered and the maze too cramped for a stalker-type enemy that can circumvent the walls. But, I was wrong. The hawk makes the game work. It takes a while to get the hang of using the gates, but once you do, the cats aren’t that hard to deal with. However, the hawk makes them relevant again, as you have a very limited amount of time to get to the center when it starts coming for you, and if there’s cats in the way and you have no dog bones, they’re going to be a problem. Without the hawk, Mouse Trap would have become too easy eventually. With it? It’s right up there with Lady Bug as the most underrated game of its breed and generation. Also, I don’t know if I got lucky or what, but the random teleporter never outright screwed me over by putting me in an unwinnable situation. Well I’ll be damned! It works!
The Colecovision port of Mouse Trap, which is VERY impressive. My only knock is that the mouse moves a little too fast, but the rest of the game is an astonishingly accurate port of the coin-op.
What sealed Mouse Trap’s status as a bonafide lost gem is the bonus items. Unlike Pac-Man, they stay on the screen until you collect them. The first one, a wedge of cheese, scores 1,000 points. Now, here’s the twist: as soon as you collect it, another bonus item appears on the screen, a paperclip. This scores 1,200 points. This continues until you die, at which point, the cycle starts over. How many different bonus items are there? THIRTY TWO! What? And your chain carries over between levels. If you just collected the item worth 2,000 points before collecting the final dot, the 2,200 point item will be waiting for you in the next level. It’s so rewarding to chase these items down, and it lends strategy to the game. There’s no penalty I could detect for taking your time to clear a maze, so you can wander back and forth collecting the items in the first maze if you want, or if you’re out of dog bones and no longer feeling confident in your chances of survival, grab the last dot and go to the next level, where more dog bones await. Awesome. Simply awesome. Mouse Trap is awesome. Why did this vanish off the face of the Earth?
Now that I understand the arcade game better, wow, Mouse Trap 2600, which I reviewed in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include Part Two, feels like an even bigger mockery of the original game. Lady Bug was RIGHT THERE and required not a single button besides the joystick to play! Mouse Trap 2600 has no teleporter in the center of the maze, no hawk, no tri-colored gates, and only three cats. It might be the most stripped-down-for-VCS game ever made. Awful.
It’s certainly not for the faint of heart. When the cats build up speed, it’s one of the most challenging maze chase games out there. That’s why the kids, aged 8 to 12, all preferred Lady Bug to Mouse Trap. Well, actually they preferred Ms. Pac-Man or Jr. Pac-Man, but choosing between Lady Bug or Mouse Trap, there was no hesitation: Lady Bug won hands down. Yesterday, I was with them, but now that I’ve dove deeper into Mouse Trap and understand the scoring system better, I might actually prefer it. You know what? Both games are amazing for different reasons, and they’re certainly deserving of a better standing in gaming history than they presently have. Playing Lady Bug and Mouse Trap back-to-back like I did was a thrill, but it was also heartbreaking. Forty years later and these games are total non-entities in modern gaming. That’s a sad fate for games that hold up amazingly to the test of time. Both understood that the maze and the chase is what makes the genre fun and exciting, and they have EXCELLENTLY designed mazes. So many releases in this genre languished in Pac-Man’s shadow because they failed to grasp that turning the tables on the ghosts wasn’t why Pac-Man was popular. It was the thrill of the chase. Mouse Trap gets that, and it’s actually optimized for it like few games in this genre are. What a great game to start my 2024 off.
Verdict: YES!
Indie Gamer Chick 
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